Jason Still’s Comments

Disney could pull an ultra-pro PR move here if they wanted. Send them a check for some insignificant amount (in Disney terms) to help offset the production costs. Maybe like $1000, probably less than some Disney exec spends on their expense account in a day for "business lunch meetings". Include a letter giving them your permission to put on the show. More importantly, in that letter include some wording like "we welcome criticism and the opportunity to improve" or "maybe some of these criticisms are valid, and we'll be taking them into consideration". Then, this is the important part (from a corporate perspective), do nothing.

Cost to the company is basically nothing. You gain some goodwill from some of the people who shared the same criticisms because now they believe you're working on changing. They may even believe they see changes where there are none. You've also planted the idea (or perhaps, further implanted the idea) that people need to seek your permission to engage in fair-use usages of your company's works.

If you were in Ryan Lanza's position right now, I'd hope you'd be more concerned about the fact that your brother killed your mother, a bunch of other innocent people, and himself rather than being concerned with filing law suits

What if one of the people he goes after turns out to be a minor? If we agree that he's being "abusive" by going after all these people, and one of them is a "child", could you argue that no defamation took place because he is, in fact, involved in a "child abuse scandal"?

By the time I read the article, the comments it had when the page loaded, and got my comment typed and submitted, things had already gotten a little out of hand.

Unfortunately, many of my compatriots get fired up enough about this stuff that they jump immediately to the "hey douchenozzle, get your facts straight you idiot!" phase and skip the "oh hey, you might not know this, and I just want to make sure you have all the facts" phase. Its understandable (again, that cNet headline was just too intentionally ignorant and incendiary) but regrettable. Just as with the IP law debates, I think we'd all be better off if all sides approached things in a more polite, respectful, logic, and truthful manner.

I think what we gun folks often take issue with is the same issue many of us here have with the copyright debate: specific words have specific meanings, and misusing them, even unintentionally, only serves to muddy the waters and make it harder to have meaningful discussion. Much like copyright infringement is not theft, the firearm this guy received is not an assault rifle. You definitely did better than the cNet article, where it was referred to as a "high definition murder weapon", and I can't fault you for not knowing the specifics when that detail wasn't that important to the point. However, I think we can both agree that it makes sense to point out such mistakes to people so that they have the facts going forward.

As for the "military-grade" part, just some info for anyone who might be curious why that might matter to non-crazy people purchasing firearms: if I'm going to drop $1000+ for a gun, I want to be sure that it is high quality and will last (especially when I'm bad about keeping it clean). The fact that something meets the standards of the military and may even be pretty much the same firearm our men and women trust their lives with every day speaks a lot to the quality of the gun. Arguments about *actual* quality and reliability of said weapons are a matter for discussion somewhere other than TechDirt. :P

I have nothing useful to add to the conversation, but I want to say that I'm totally stoked that something I said once ended up on Urban Dictionary. Clearly it only happened because I was just some random guy on the internet commenting on a blog post, and it would never work for someone who was already well known, but its exciting nonetheless.

And on the other end, some of the best movies and tv DO need, and make heavy, relevant use of, music. Imagine Star Wars with all the music removed. The impact and feel of many scenes would be vastly different without the musical score. Perhaps it wouldn't make a difference to someone who is seeing it for the first time, but all of us who have seen it with music would certainly miss the emotional impact that the music is there to help impart. That, I believe, was the point here. The music played an important role in the impact of the show, and its removal is a loss for our common culture.

Copyright is law, and piracy is breaking copyright law, or do you disagree with that? You said the greedy pirates are ruining it for those who only pirate a little, which sounded similar to the view we tend to have of speeding - that is, you shouldn't do it, but everyone does, so just don't do it too much or too fast and understand that there will be reasonable repercussions if you are caught.

Also, I'm not sure what cause I gave you to jump straight to insults when I'm just trying to engage in reasoned discussion with you. I'm not surprised, mind you, because I've seen many of your other posts turn out the same way. I just hoped that maybe this time you could be civil with someone who was being civil towards you. Lesson learned, I suppose.

I wish that you pirates weren't so greedy, because you've ruined it for everyone who only filches a little

So you're saying it is ok to break the law, as long as you only do it a little? Sounds kind of like speeding, to me at least. We have a system of dealing with that, and it involves giving the offender a reasonable fine and generally requires proof that they actually broke the law (let's skip the debate about accuracy of measuring devices, speed cameras, and such for now). We also don't usually punish the car manufacturers and road builders/maintainers when someone uses their cars/roads to speed and we rarely place requirements on them to ensure that people can't speed. I think, then, that it would be logical and reasonable to expect something similar to work on the "information superhighway" as what works for the real highway.

What channels have commercials? I listen to Liquid Metal every day for about an hour and a half (45 mins each way to and from work) and the only things resembling commercials are the "you're listening to liquid metal on sirius/xm" every 5 songs or so.

You're right, copyright infringement and murder are INCREDIBLY SIMILAR! And since the solution to stop infringement seems to be "skip the legal system, I say they infringed so they automatically lose their hosting, domain names, etc" the same solution will clearly work with murder. We're going to save millions in court costs! What method of execution would you prefer when I notify the authorities that you may have murdered 77 people?

I've been out of the ISP world for a many years now, but here's how I remember things:

Let's say you want to connect to awesomewebsite.com. They're hosted at a facility that has a connection provided by Level3. Your ISP is AT&T. You pay AT&T so that your connection can bounce around inside their network (both backbone and non-backbone). When your connection leaves their backbone and hits Level3 the costs are now covered by the people on their side (the hosting company, who passes the cost on to the website owner). The backbone providers don't charge each other (as far as I remember) because they'd both just charge each other the same amount and each end up owing nothing.

The road analogy does, sort of, work here. Take a road that is maintained by the counties it is in and crosses county lines. Taxes collected in county A cover their side of the road, taxes in county B cover their side, and no one (yet?) thinks people traveling from A to B should have to pay taxes on both sides just because they drove down the road.